The man whose advice to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan may have helped spawn two separate recall efforts against her has decided to reach for the brass ring himself.

Dan Siegel, an attorney and activist, announced his run for mayor this week.

Siegel was among Quan's closest friends and a trusted, unpaid adviser to the mayor until November 2011, when city officials ordered the dismantling of the Occupy Oakland encampment outside City Hall.

He resigned in protest - and in support of the Occupy movement, "not the 1 percent and its government facilitators," he wrote on his Twitter account.

Siegel, one of the harshest critics of the Oakland Police Department, had persuaded the mayor's office to engage protesters instead of using police to force them from the downtown plaza. His advice seemed only to make a bad situation worse: Chaos and health hazards at the encampment intensified. A man was shot and killed near the camp in the days leading up to the police sweep.

None of those facts seemed to faze Siegel, who criticized the city's crackdown on the camp.

"The city sent police to evict this camp, arrest people and potentially hurt them," he said, announcing his resignation as the mayor's adviser. "Obviously, we're not on the same page."

And unless some of Siegel's more radical viewpoints have changed as radically in the last three years, many Oakland residents aren't going to be on the same page, either.

His Twitter home page says it all: "Grown-up 60's activist and radical lawyer. Outdoors adventurer. Committed to ending the rule of capital." Everything but the part about being grown up seems accurate.

"The concentration of wealth that in this country has concentrated 10-fold, people living on the edge of poverty," Siegel told me in a Thursday phone interview. "That's what I'm talking about when I talk about the rule of capital."

Siegel said he is running to provide a "sharp alternative" for Oakland residents.

His mayoral campaign will focus on community-based policing, using public schools as community centers and an incremental pay increase to a minimum wage of $15 an hour in Oakland.

He questioned Quan's goal of staffing the Police Department with 900 officers, and says half as many well-managed officers on the street could accomplish the job. Oakland now has about 620 officers.

"I'm not antipolice at all," Siegel said. "I'm all for policing, but effective policing and policing that relies on community support."

Siegel has not modified his viewpoints much since they were formed in the cauldron of protest and confrontation on the streets of Berkeley in the late 1960s. It may seem admirable, but it also makes him something of an anachronism in the modern-day political world.

That singular drive is a good quality for a military leader - or a street activist - to possess, but it can hinder political discussions where compromise and cooperation are often what's required to make progress. Even politically correct progress.

The same bullheaded single-mindedness has led Siegel to challenge Quan, one of his longest-running political allies. The two met in college at UC Berkeley and served one term together on the Oakland School Board.

When Siegel and Quan parted ways publicly over the handling of Occupy protesters, the mayor said that they would both be "moving on."

It's clear to anyone who's watched that Quan has matured in the job since then - perhaps not enough for her critics, but well beyond the indecisive shakiness that defined her actions around the Occupy dilemma.

It's also clear that Siegel has no plans to adjust in his hard-driving approach to politics or to modify the ideals that have guided him for decades.